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Iraqi Yazidi Girl Tells Of Captivity In IS Group

Photo: AP --A 15-year-old Yazidi girl captured by the Islamic State group and
forcibly married to a militant in Syria sits on the floor of a one-room
house she now shares with her family after escaping in early August,
while speaking in an interview with The Associated Press in Maqluba, a
hamlet near the Kurdish city of Dahuk, 260 miles (430 kilometers)
northwest of Baghdad, Iraq. The girl was among hundreds of women and
girls from the Yazidi religious minority captured by Islamic State
fighters in early August when the militants overran their hometown of
Sinjar in northwestern Iraq. Hundreds were killed in the attack, and
tens of thousands fled for their lives, most to Kurdish-held parts of
the north.

MAQLUBA, IRAQ (ASSOCIATED PRESS) — The young Yazidi girl rocked
apprehensively as she described the ordeal that took her from her
family, snatched from her home by militants in Iraq, then sold as a
slave in Syria before finally escaping to Turkey.

The 15-year-old is now with what is left of her
family — two of her brothers and some more distant relatives — living
in a makeshift roadside shelter in this tiny village in northern Iraq,
along with other families shattered by the onslaught from the Islamic
State militant group.

Her two sisters remain in the militants' hands, and her father, other
brothers and other male relatives have vanished, their fates unknown.
The girl was among hundreds of women and girls from the Yazidi religious
minority captured by Islamic State fighters in early August when the
militants overran her hometown of Sinjar in northwestern Iraq. Hundreds
were killed in the attack, and tens of thousands fled for their lives,
most to the Kurdish-held parts of northern Iraq.

Iraq's Human Rights Ministry said at the time that
hundreds of women were abducted by the militants, who consider the
Yazidis a heretical sect. The Associated Press spoke to the girl and
several other young women who escaped captivity by the Islamic State
group. While specifics of their stories could not be independently
confirmed, they reflected circumstances reported by the United Nations
last month.

They each independently painted a similar picture
of how the militants scattered them around the broad swath of territory
controlled by the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq and sold the
girls to the group's foreign fighters or other supporters for
"marriage."

For weeks after being snatched from Sinjar, the
15-year-old girl and two of her sisters were shifted from one place to
another, she said. The AP does not identify victims of abuse, and the
girl also did not want to be named for fear of reprisals against her
relatives still being held by the militants.
As she told her story, the girl rubbed her hands
and avoided eye contact. But she spoke decisively and clearly, never
hesitating when asked questions. She asked her relatives to leave the
room, saying she was more comfortable speaking alone.

First, she said, she and other girls were taken to
the nearby town of Tal Afar, where she was kept in the Badosh Prison.
When U.S. airstrikes began around the town, the militants took her and
many other girls with them to the Islamic State group's biggest
stronghold, Mosul, in northern Iraq.

From the city of Mosul, she and her sisters were
taken to the militants' de facto capital, the Syrian city of Raqqa.
There they were held in a house with other abducted girls. "They took
girls to Syria to sell them," she said, her body shyly hunched over as
she spoke. "I was sold in Syria. I stayed about five days with my two
sisters, then one of my sisters was sold and taken (back) to Mosul, and I
remained in Syria."

In Raqqa, she said, she was first married off to a
Palestinian man. She claims she shot him, saying the Palestinian's Iraqi
housekeeper who was in a dispute with the man helped her by giving her a
gun. She fled, but she had nowhere to run. So she went to the only
place she knew, she said — the house where she was first held with the
other girls in Raqqa.

There, the militants did not recognize her and sold
her off again — for $1,000 to a Saudi fighter, she said. The Saudi
militant took her to a house where he lived with other fighters. "He
told me, 'I'm going to change your name to Abeer, so your mother doesn't
recognize you,'" she said. "You'll become Muslim, then I will marry
you. But I refused to become a Muslim and that's why I fled."
She said she saw the fighters at time taking a
powdered drug. So she poured it into tea she served to the Saudi and the
other men, causing them to fall asleep. Then she fled the house. She
found a man who would drive her to Turkey to meet her brother. Her
brother then borrowed $2,000 from friends to pay a smuggler to get them
both back to Iraq. They ended up in Maqluba, a tiny roadside hamlet just
outside the Kurdish city of Dahuk, where several other Yazidi families
are staying.

The other women who spoke to The AP described
difficult conditions, where the militant fighters would deprive them of
enough food, water or even a place to sit. They all reported having seen
dozens of other Yazidi women and children as young as 5-years old in
captivity, and they all said that they have relatives who are still
missing.

Amsha Ali, a 19-year-old, said she was taken from
Sinjar to Mosul. Ali was around six months pregnant at the time. The
last she saw of her husband and other men in her family as she was being
dragged off, was the scene of the militants forcing them to lie on the
ground, apparently to shoot them. Ali agreed to be identified, saying
she wanted the ordeals of the women to be known.

In Mosul, she said, she and other women were taken
to a house full of Islamic State fighters to be married off. "Each of
them took one of us for themselves," she said. She too was given to a
fighter. She said she was never raped by the man — likely because of her
pregnancy, she said — but she witnessed other girls being raped.

After several weeks, she was able to slip out of a
bathroom window at night and escape. A Mosul resident who found her in
the streets helped her get out of the city to nearby Kurdish territory
on Aug. 28, she said. She said she tried to convince other women to flee
with her, but they were too afraid. "Because they were so terrified,
they are left there and now I know nothing about them," she said.

Now Ali is with her father and a surviving sister
living in an unfinished building in the town of Sharia, where some 5,000
Yazidi refugees live, also near Dahuk. "The killing was not the hardest
thing for me," she said of seeing fellow Yazidis slain in the assault
on Sinjar. "Even though they forced my husband, brother-in-law and
father-in-law on the ground to be murdered — it was painful — but
marrying (the militant) was the worst. It was hardest thing for me."

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